Work Text:
Pink eyes stare down at him, the image casting a glow over the dimly-lit control room of the ship. The hologram flickers as it begins to load the page. Words cascade down the screen in a waterfall of information he already knows by heart.
Quiche has memorized every single detail on their profile for Mew Ichigo. Appearance. Abilities. Known weaknesses. He knows every phrase by memory. “Leader of the Mews”, “extreme agility”, “quick reflexes”, “can finish off a chimera animal in one strike.”
There’s a new paragraph near the bottom. Pie wrote it a few months ago, shortly after a particularly disastrous battle. “When in distress, Mew Ichigo summons the Blue Knight. This behavior does not appear purposeful on her behalf.”
Quiche reads it again as he runs the tips of his fingers gingerly over one of the deeper cuts to his chest. The wound is slick with medicinal balm, raised like a mountain peak over his collarbone, jutting down towards his ribs. Those two sentences read differently to him now. He has been out of commission for about two weeks, and has just regained the ability to maneuver a weapon without opening one of his cuts. The way Pie explains it, he’s lucky he isn’t dead.
The only reason the Blue Knight didn’t kill him … was her.
Quiche stares up at the hologram image of Ichigo as he allows the memory to press down on him again.
He is in excruciating pain. The smell of blood is overwhelming, and his senses are in a frenzy, feeling the tears in his muscles pulse with every heartbeat. He wants to die. He wants the Blue Knight to kill him. And as he looks up at the Blue Knight, raising his sword to deliver the final blow, two things happen at once.
He realizes the Blue Knight and Deep Blue are one.
And Ichigo screams out orders not to kill him.
The whole thing is a sick sort of comedy, really. It hadn’t taken long for Quiche to connect the dots that Ichigo’s scrawny human boyfriend had somehow developed magical abilities of his own — even though Ichigo still seems unaware of that fact. But now, he finally knows why this pathetic human boy has suddenly developed powers rivaling those of Quiche and his companions.
Deep Blue has a host. His powers are manifesting in a way that protects Ichigo, at least for the time being. But as soon as Deep Blue has the ability to squash the remaining bits of the human soul inhabiting his chosen vessel … Masaya Aoyama will be a shell of his formerly human self. And Deep Blue won’t have the same mercy.
Why didn’t Ichigo let the Blue Knight kill him?
Quiche has been turning the question over in his mind for the past two weeks, and the only logical conclusion he can find is that Ichigo simply isn’t comfortable with the concept of death. The Blue Knight is not part of Tokyo Mew Mew. He isn’t bound by the same sense of morality, and the human conscience that tells him not to kill. The same lack of conscience would soon manifest in the awakening of their god — with infinite more power, and a merciless task to wipe out every last human on planet Earth.
Every last human.
Quiche stares up at pink eyes, and lets himself fall into a brief fantasy that Ichigo spared his life for another reason — one besides the guilt of death. He lets himself envision for a moment that she wants him around. That maybe she feels the same way he does whenever his fingertips brush her skin. Even in that last battle, taunting the Blue Knight by grabbing hold of her waist, pulling her back against him in a mockery of the Blue Knight’s ability to shield her … even in the rush of the battle, adrenaline soared in his veins at the feeling of her warm body against his. He remembers the familiar smell of her hair. Her tail swishing between his legs. It was only a few seconds' time, but he’s already played the memory back in his mind countless times. It joins a catalog of memories in his mind, thoughts of her piling up like an overflowing stack of boxes shoved in the corner of his waking consciousness.
It feels like a sickness. She is a disease to him, an addiction aching deep in his bones. He wants to hate it. He wants to hate the rush he feels when she says his name. He wants to hate the way her lips tasted when he first kissed her. He wants to hate everything about her.
It would be easier that way. It would be easy if thoughts of her hadn’t already reached a fever pitch, an unrelenting cry against everything Quiche thought he knew. He thought knew what he had to do in order to fulfill his promise to his people, but now, his mind is ravaged by the thought of an Earth without Ichigo on it. Is that really what he wants? Is he really capable of seeing her dead, and fulfilling everything he had set out to accomplish on his mission?
He has already tried to weave pathways in his mind, winding roads that led him to a future with her in it. No matter how he pictures it, all roads converge at a singular point — a point where Ichigo must cooperate with Quiche, and Deep Blue must agree to spare Ichigo’s life. It’s difficult for him to picture anything beyond that point, because the sheer concept of reaching it seems insurmountable. But it doesn’t stop him from wishing, hoping.
“When in distress, Mew Ichigo summons the Blue Knight.”
Quiche knows what he needs to do next. He needs to find Ichigo before she turns into her Mew form, then test the correlation between her emotional response to fear, and the power of the Blue Knight. Pie proposed a theory to him that the more distressed Ichigo becomes, the more manic the power of the Blue Knight. And the more Masaya Aoyama loses control of the Blue Knight, the closer they grow to Deep Blue taking over the vessel completely.
It makes sense. If the Blue Knight is a manifestation of Masaya Aoyama’s need to tap into Deep Blue’s power — without Deep Blue’s consciousness present — then the greater the need for power, the more the human will allow Deep Blue’s power to consume him completely … not knowing what lies in wait for him when he loses control.
It’s a good plan. Quiche is more than ready to face the Blue Knight, rage already bubbling up fresh in his gut at the pain he’s suffered under the Blue Knight’s sword. And he’s itching to see Ichigo again — though he knows their next encounter will be one of calculated terror. A darker part of his mind delights in the idea of her being scared of him. After all, fear is control, and Quiche craves the kind of control that would allow Ichigo to do what he says. Not just for his own selfish desires, but also to save her life.
He fights the urge to pick at a scab on one of the cuts on his arm. 26 total cuts. Some slicing down to the muscle, some not. Despite the multitude of injuries covering his body, he’s not scared of the Blue Knight. He’ll train harder. Study his opponent’s technique more thoroughly. And hopefully, Deep Blue will begin to stir.
Then what?
Quiche stares up at the image of Ichigo again. He hugs his knee to his chest, and rests his chin on it. It does him no good to tiptoe around the stark reality laid out in front of him. The likelihood of a world where both Deep Blue and Ichigo are both alive, simultaneously … it’s slim to none. Time ticks mercilessly on, counting down to the inevitable end to his mission. He knows time is running out, and once it does, Tokyo Mew Mew will cease to exist.
It’s everything he’s planned for. Everything he set out to fulfill as his mission. The complete destruction of the human race. But as he stares into pink eyes that so often visit him in his dreams, the thought of following through with it makes him sick.
On a slow, labored exhale, the thought comes to him quietly, slipping its way into his consciousness unprompted, and without fanfare.
I’m in love with her.
The thought lingers in his mind by itself for a few moments, suspending all other thoughts around it as Quiche begins to fully grasp its meaning.
He’s always dismissed his feelings for her as an infatuation, seeing her as a plaything to keep him entertained over the course of his mission. But in time, it became painfully obvious that she is more than that to him.
She is all-consuming, filling the idle hours of his mind with memories of the softness of her lips. Every bone in his body craves her touch. He wants to hear her say his name … over, and over, and over again. She is the only human of her kind. Different. Special. She is beautiful, fiery, clever and powerful … all of the things he could ever want. She is everything, except she isn’t his.
And he hates it. He hates the feeling of powerlessness. He hates feeling that despite teetering on the brink of fulfilling everything his people had sent him to accomplish on the strange planet, he swings wildly between the thrill of claiming Earth as theirs, and the harrowing fear of what would become of their defense’s leader. What would become of the girl he loves.
The distress grows louder in his mind. It feels like a building scream; like a chattering white noise behind his eyes. He tries to shut out thoughts of her; instead, he thinks of the arrival of his people’s fleet of ships, and the smell of iron and ash all around him. The Earth is collapsing, and she is gone.
Quiche leans forward and punches one of the controls in front of him. The holographic screen in front of him flickers off, the ship’s control room going dark once more.
Quiche rests his head back on the wall he sits against. He closes his eyes and begins to drift into a fantasy once more … one where this is easy. One where their mission is simple. He watches as Ichigo turns around to laugh, smiling back at him like he’s always dreamed of. There’s no war. There’s no one else besides them. They are happy.
He slips his hand into hers. And they go together into a world that will never be.